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If anyone wandering through the Toronto Hyatt lobby recognizes the girl with the canary quiff, they’re keeping it to themselves.

She’s a star, though. Emeli Sande is the big-voiced, 24-year-old vocalist with a UK No. 1 album (Our Version of Events), the bragging rights of working with Alicia Keys and Coldplay, and a pop artist who claimed the Critics’ Choice prize at the 2012 BRIT Awards just weeks before arriving in Toronto, an honour that previously tipped the likes of Adele and Florence + The Machine for superstardom.

As Sande talks, a girl walks by, clutching a Florence + The Machine tote-bag. Maybe in a few months’ time she’ll grab something similar at one of Sande’s shows. (By July, the singer will be playing stadiums in Canada, opening for Coldplay on their North American tour, and she frequently includes a jazzy version of “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall” in her sets. “If you ever want to get Coldplay’s support, do a cover,” she jokes.)

Today, though -- the afternoon after playing a tiny, unplugged club show for Toronto media and music industry -- she’s just another girl finishing lunch, and Sande sizes up the situation in North America.

“It’s like starting from scratch,” she says. For the last few days, she’s dotted North America doing similar showcases.

She means that in a good way, though. “Things are so much bigger and I’m using a full band back home,” she says. Her spring tour of the UK, for instance, sold out in early March. “It’s nice to just completely pull it back again.”

If you really want to “pull it back,” Sande might suggest you start when she was “about 15.” That’s the year she won a radio songwriting contest, one that pulled her out of her Aberdeen, Scotland hometown and sent her to London.

“That was my first moment where [I thought] ‘Wow, this could really happen,’” she remembers of her then-fledgling career. On that trip she found a manager. He’s still with her, by the way. (Literally. Just a few feet away, he hangs with reps from Sande’s label.) But when it came to the contest’s prize, a recording contract, Sande balked. That record deal, at 15, wasn’t what she wanted. “I didn’t want to sign anything that wasn’t going to give me a long career that I really dreamt of,” she says.

What she wanted instead was an education, so she turned down the record deal and five years of med school followed. She continued pursuing music, though, keeping at it in ordinary ways -- “I’d try to find open mic nights, I made a little EP and I sent that to radio” -- until one of her songs reached an audience larger than a campus talent show. “Diamond Rings,” the debut single by British rapper Chipmunk, features Sande and was co-written by the musician and her frequent co-conspirator, producer Shahid Khan (working name, Naughty Boy). Released in 2009, it was a Top 10 UK hit, and it’s around that time Sande -- still a student -- accepted a publishing contract, a deal that had her supplying tunes for all stripes of British pop acts, from rapper Tinie Tempah to Susan Boyle. (Simon Cowell has famously said that Sande’s his favourite songwriter. A potentially dubious honour, depending on your taste for melodramatic hooks.)

“Initally I went back to med school, and I was kind of balancing them both,” Sande says of her music/med-student careers. (She doesn’t appear in the video for “Diamond Rings,” because she was reportedly too busy with exams.) “And that started to frustrate me, that I wasn’t giving 100 per cent,” she says. “You know, I’m quite competitive, so I just wanted to be the best medic I could be, or the best musician I could be, and the fact I was giving 50 per cent to both did start to give on my nerves.”

So she left school, reportedly 18-months shy of becoming a doctor, to become a professional songwriter, but even then, you could argue her focus wasn’t quite at 100 per cent. While she was giving songs to different artists, Sande was saving others for what would become her debut album Our Version of Events, and working towards launching a performing career of her own.

Still, Sande says she’s glad she had to wait.

“At that point,” she says, “I didn’t have the confidence that fits my music, and that really just ‘goes for it’ in that way.” (Live, she’s one of those performers who command an audience with just her voice -- a controlled and occasionally brassy belt.)

“I’m not counting on a guy behind a desk to tell me if my music’s good or not,” she says. “I felt very shy about what I wanted to do, and the confidence came from writing for other people, really starting to understand that I had the say in whether it’s going to be successful or not.”

Sande, for instance, developed the foresight to demand veto power on where her record was made. It was all because of a lesson she picked up during her backroom writing days. After first being signed, she was sent to New York and L.A. to collaborate with various songwriters. She didn’t come back with anything usable -- “We wrote great tunes, but they weren’t necessarily me,” she says -- but she returned with a new resolve. Her album was going to be homegrown.

“Everything was made in London,” she says of Our Version of Events, and was recorded with people already in her creative circle. “I wanted it to sound like me, and I’m British,” she says laughing. “I wanted it to sound British [like] the things that have inspired me -- like drum and bass is big thing in Britain,” a fact which would account for the ‘90s throwback beats on lead single “Heaven.”

Other styles would seem to have inspired the rest of the record, however. “Heaven” is the only track that gets nostalgic about the trip-hop era. Its follow-up single, “Next to Me,” is giddy, polished soul-pop with Sande pounding the keys, and much of the record is filled out with ballads, many inspired by her family -- songs which display Sande’s vocal talent, while revealing she’s a much softer personality than her haircut (and lead single) would suggest.

Out since February in the UK, Our Version of Events is tipped to get a North American release in June. And confident as her days as a songwriter-for-hire have made her, she says that finally taking the spotlight has given her another shot of self-esteem.

“Everyone can say what they want about your music now. Instead of it being this secret little thing that I had in the studio,” says Sande, “and for me, at the beginning, I would say it was really strange. … But I enjoy it.

“It’s given me a lot more confidence to just go out and be who I am, take it or leave it.”

Emeli Sande’s Canadian tour dates with Coldplay include July 23 and 24, Toronto; July 26 and 27, Montreal.

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